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How best to answer ‘Tell Me About Yourself’?

November 30, 2016

Imagine, you enter the interview room, the interviewer is sitting right in front of you and asks you to have your seat, and then before you can feel comfortable he throws the most scary question at you Tell me about yourself?

Here’s how to crush it:

Talking about yourself should be easy, right? Who knows you better than you? However, in an interview, we don’t want to know everything about you. We don’t care about your life story – who your parents are, what they do, your religion, and where you live. Its probably the most common mistake I see people making – spending too much time talking about personal information, rather than painting a picture of their professional background and career aspirations.

The best way to answer this question is to make sure you cover this core theme in your answer:

How does your personal and professional background relate to you being an extremely good candidate for the position you’re interviewing for?

Any information that doesn’t make a strong case for you should be an excellent candidate isn’t important here.

A good answer shouldn’t be more than 60-90 seconds and should cover core these core points:

Where’d you go to school (and what you studied)

A very short summation of your career or background

The last job you’ve had, what that company did, key responsibilities and one important impact you made in that organization

Why you’re there interviewing for this job

That said, you don’t need to necessarily memorize your answer to this classic question. You don’t want it to come out sounding canned. Practice a few versions of how to respond and remember that the most crucial part of interviewing is to be yourself.

“Why does the interviewer ask this question?? (Tell me about Yourself or Introduce Yourself)”

The following points answers this question:

1. The interviewer wants to know about your background.
2. He needs a quick overview of your resume by yourself.
3. How you present yourself
4. How confident are you about yourself.
5. How clear are your views and your thought process.
6. Do you stammer and get nervous while presenting yourself?
7. Have you ever demonstrated leadership qualities.
8. How consistent are you?
9. Are you arrogant or too proud of yourself?
The HR’s decision depends a lot on the above questions.